CS Muturi: I have boycotted Cabinet meetings over abductions
Public Service Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi. Inset is President William Ruto.
Public Service Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi has demanded that the Cabinet addresses abductions, disappearances and extrajudicial killings as a matter of grave concern to Kenyans.
The CS said he had boycotted Cabinet meetings chaired by President William Ruto until such a time his administration deemed it important to discuss the matter.
“I have written to the chairman who is the president and excused myself from Cabinet meetings. The Cabinet is the highest decision making organ in the country and it should address such matters of grave concern to Kenyans,” CS Muturi said in an interview with Citizen TV on Wednesday night.
Mr Muturi said that after the president publicly said his administration would end abductions and extrajudicial killings, he expected Dr Ruto to issue a Cabinet memorandum to that effect.
“Failure to discuss these issues as a country runs the risk of normalising them...A case in point is what happened in Mathare the other day where people were being robbed and property destroyed while the police were nowhere to be seen. Silence by all of us not discussing these issues is going to give us that kind of result,” he warned.
“The other day the MCA from Wajir who was missing for six months just reappears and we are quiet. You think this is a normal thing?”
'I am not a coward'
Asked why he has not resigned, CS Muturi said speaking against abductions and extrajudicial killings cannot be grounds to quit, adding that doing so would be an act of cowardice.
“How would people take somebody who sees a problem and instead of talking about it, walks away? On my part that would be cowardly.”
On whether he was worried that his defiance to president Ruto was likely to earn him the sack, the former Attorney-General said:
“If I am fired by he who has the power to hire and fire for speaking against abductions and extrajudicial killings which is unconstitutional, and what we campaigned and vehemently vowed will never happen under our watch, so be it.”
In what seems to be a precursor to a further strained relationship between the CS and president Ruto, the Democratic Party (DP), which Mr Muturi is associated with, has already given notice to formally quit the Kenya Kwanza coalition.
However, Mr Muturi maintains that he was not an official of DP and that he learnt of the letter in the news.
“It did not originate from me. It is purely the DP organ's decision to do so and I need not be briefed as it happens.”
He went on: “I am still in government because I am part of the coalition. I campaigned for it and I am perfectly within my right to be in this government.”